With over 3,000 readers, our books are some of the most popular products. We continually update our books—a benefit of publishing online—and with some recent development I thought it was worth giving an update on the status of our titles. Read on if you’ve downloaded one of our books and want to know what’s in the pipeline, or are just curious to learn about what we publish.
Creative Scala
Creative Scala is our most popular book, which is no surprise because it’s free. It’s also, I feel, our most undeveloped title.
I’ve learned that writing a book is a lot like writing software, in that you only work what you’re doing when you’ve finished. This was very much the case with Creative Scala, which we started with very little plan other than to write something that would be fun and suitable for people new to Scala, while avoiding covering the same ground as Essential Scala. I think we got the fun part right (graphics!) but didn’t do so great a job on the Scala bits. Creative Scala covers very little of Scala and I’d like to make it more solid introduction to the absolute basics of Scala while keeping the content engaging.
The good bit is we’ve worked out some material (animations!) that will be both fun and allow us to go further into Scala. Actually writing it up is proving difficulty, however, mainly due to everyone being flat out on other projects. So if you’re wondering what will happen with Creative Scala, it will get additional content but we don’t yet have a time frame for that to happen.
Advanced Scala
Advanced Scala is our most popular book after Creative Scala, but hasn’t received an update for far too long. That will change soon, as I’m actively working on it again. The current plan is to complete the data validation case study, and then start polishing the existing material. Updates will be released whenever a major chunk of work is completed.
Essential Scala
Essential Scala recently come out of pre-release! This means the book has hit a stage where we think it says everything it needs to say and is mostly free of typos. This doesn’t mean it is finished for all time. There have been a number of updates since Essential Scala hit 1.0, with some larger updates planned for the future, and of course anyone purchasing now will get those improvements.
Essential Slick
Essential Slick for Slick 2 has been available for a while, and a new version for Slick 3 has recently entered pre-release, with chapters 1, 2, and 6 available. This is a big enough deal that is has it’s own blog post laying out the changes—and a free PDF preview.
Essential Play
Essential Play is our one book that doesn’t need updating. The Play APIs haven’t changed much in recent releases, and until Play makes some big changes Essential Play is essentially perfect.